Samsung and Apple had been fighting patent suits in court for a very long time now with no sign of suits ending. With the launch of the iPhone 5, Samsung Electronics has announced this week that it plans to add Apple's newest smartphone to its existing patent lawsuits against the company.

If Samsung happened to win an injunction against Apple in the patent suits, sales of the iPhone 5 could be blocked, but that seems unlikely. Apple had pre-order sales of over 2 million units in the first 24 hours of availability and will hit store shelves this Friday.

"Samsung anticipates that it will file, in the near future, a motion to amend its infringement contentions to add the iPhone 5 as an accused product," it said in a U.S. court filing.

"Based on information currently available, Samsung expects that the iPhone 5 will infringe the asserted Samsung patents-in-suit in the same way as the other accused iPhone models."

Samsung issued a statement today that added, "Apple continues to take aggressive legal measures that will limit market competition. Under these circumstances, we have little choice but to take the steps necessary to protect our innovations and intellectual property rights."

The escalating legal battle comes after Apple scored a win in August when a U.S. jury found that Samsung had copied certain critical features of the Apple iPhone. Damages awarded Apple in that case amounted to $1.05 billion. The jury in that case also found that Apple had not infringed on any of Samsung's patents. Naturally, Samsung said it would appeal the ruling.

However, Apple recently asked the court to triple the award against Samsung to $3 billion.

Lawyers don't bill their salary. Billable time and what it is billed out as is only loosely tied to the lawyers' salaries. Additionally, retainer fees often are independent of billable time and billed rates. The best lawyers get a very large fraction of their personal income from the partnership itself (saves a HUGE amount in taxes).

I was giving charge values for individual lawyers as billable rates on the case. Having personally dealt with such lawyers (hell, I had one back in the early 90s that was charging $400 an hour back then), I know that it is rare for an individual lawyer to charge too much over $1,000 an hour, but still charge 250+ hours a month. (They do bill you for their drive time if they are on the phone with, or are riding with, *anyone* related to the case because, of course, they are "working" on your case.) I'd be shocked if the *average* billable rate for either Apple's or Samsung's lawyers is close to $1,000 per hour.

It is also not unusual for a firm to have 100+ lawyers plus law clerks plus admins working on cases like these. Thus the total LABOR bill (not including expenses which can easily double that) can easily be $10 million a month or more -- and that is PER CASE. Since a case can last a couple years or more (not including appeals) a case can easily cost the client in cases like these a total of more than a quarter billion.